How do I decide on my wedding cake design? There’s so much choice!

How do I decide on my wedding cake? There’s so much choice!

About a third of the couples I see often tell me there is so much choice out there for wedding cakes that they find it difficult to decide on their wedding cake design.

There are lots of images on Pinterest: I spend hours looking at Pinterest every week. It’s a great source of inspiration, and sometimes brides have compiled a board for their wedding which they share with me to get ideas and colours for their cake. But the sheer number of choices can be overwhelming.

One of the first things a couple will book is their venue. The venue will often define the style of the wedding. For example, in an architecturally-elaborate building, the wedding cake could fit with the style of the building or room where the cake will be. The same applies to a barn wedding, which is why so many couples having their wedding in a barn will choose a naked or semi-naked cake (see my blog post about the difference between a naked, semi-naked and covered cake.

That is not to say though, that you can’t have an elaborate wedding cake in a barn venue. But often the venue choice is a couple’s expression of what suits them as a couple; a rustic setting often then encourages rustic elements in the wedding.

So the venue can be the starting point for deciding on the cake style.

To put the cake design together, I will ask couples about features of their wedding:

Which flowers will be used in the bouquets and venue dressing? (I can reproduce most flowers in sugar and can match up the colours and shades chosen). With the following cake, the type and shades of the sugar roses matched the flowers for the wedding and the shade of peach for the cake covering was created to match the peach used in the venue dressing. Additionally, the piped designs on the cake matched parts of the lace on the bride’s dress.

What will the bridesmaids be wearing? For one wedding, the bridesmaids dresses were black, so a narrow black ribbon was used at the base of each cake tier as shown below:

Will there be any lace on the wedding dress? I can take elements of this lace and produce a bespoke, piped design on the cake as shown here:

Is there anything unique/dear to the couple which they’d like to incorporate onto the cake? This could be colours, a saying, a flower, or even a modelled figure. The cake below has sugar models of the couple – every detail, from their clothes on the day down to the jewellery they would be wearing, was featured on the models: